It is commonly recognized that polyester based modern microfiches as well as films may carry information printed on their optical reactive emulsions for very long periods. Therefore, one possible solution for long-term archival of data, e.g. of movies, photographs, scans of cultural heritage, etc., is to print the analog data directly onto such microfiches or films.
An important benefit of storing such photographs or scans in an analogous manner is that the archived objects are directly visible, i.e. perceptible, to the naked eye. Therefore, if the archived analog data need to be recovered sometime in the future, the archivists can directly see what has been printed. Hence, no dedicated scanning devices and decoding or deciphering schemas need to be applied. This is advantageous as the knowledge about the necessary scanning devices or the schemas might be lost in the course of time.
In this regard US 2007/0092842 discloses a method of recording data on a photographic support. Digital encoding marks are formed on the support, which are linked to data items recorded on the support. The digital encoding marks contain metadata associated to the data items. One particular application is the recording of data relating to images captured on a film. The data are metadata related to the images. They give the conditions and circumstances in which the images were captured or treated as well as a description of the characteristics of the deployed film. These metadata can be helpful for a future processing of the recorded images.
Though the quality of the photographs or scans to be archived is important for the quality of the data that can later be retrieved from the microfiches or films, the rescanning process is mainly responsible for major deviations between the originals and the corresponding facsimiles. Very often the brightness resolution of the scanned data does not match the original brightness of the photographs or scans.